Cellular telephony continues to evolve at a rapid pace. Cellular telephone networks currently exist in a variety of forms and operate using a variety of modulations, signaling techniques, and protocols, such as those found in 3G and LTE networks (3rd Generation of mobile telecommunications technology and Long Term Evolution, respectively). As consumers require more capacity, the networks evolve. For example, some carriers, or Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), employ a combination of 3G and the faster LTE because MNOs needed faster networks to satiate the increased demand for data and voice.
Moreover, efforts exist to implement these technologies in radio frequency (RF) bands that comprise conflicting communications. For example, there has been accelerated development of LTE in unlicensed bands (a.k.a. LTE-U and Licensed-Assisted-Access, or “LAA-LTE”) where WiFi has traditionally been implemented. Unlike LTE, however, WiFi employs a method of Listen Before Talk (LBT) to ensure that WiFi systems do not interfere with one another. With LBT in WiFi, a WiFi node determines that a transmission is successful if it receives an acknowledgement (ACK) shortly after the transmission. The lack of an ACK means that a collision has occurred and the WiFi node doubles its contention window and re-contends for the channel. However, because Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) ACKs and non-acknowledgements (NACKs) are sent in 3 subframes (i.e., 3 ms after the transmission of data), LTE systems have difficulty changing a contention window size.